


A Day By Your Side

by cricket_aria



Category: Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (Movies)
Genre: Confessions, F/M, Post-Canon, Tinder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:14:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27095638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cricket_aria/pseuds/cricket_aria
Summary: As a general rule Bethany only used Tinder as imagination fuel, until the day she saw the face of someone she'd always just assumed was too married to even be an option.
Relationships: Alex Vreeke/Bethany Walker
Comments: 11
Kudos: 138
Collections: Fic In A Box





	A Day By Your Side

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BiffElderberry](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BiffElderberry/gifts).



"I could have just stayed in Honolulu for a vacation," Bethany muttered to herself as she stared out the plane's window at the boring sight of the tarmac below. Though she knew that wasn't a choice she would ever have actually made--the life she'd picked for herself bringing her home too rarely for her to remove a visit back from her plans--if she'd at least spent one night on the island instead of just never even leaving the airport while she waited for her connecting flight maybe she wouldn't be getting close to her second hour sitting around because there was some technical problem with the jet bridge.

Bethany was starting to get overwhelmingly bored. She'd finished a book she'd started reading two months before then never had much time to sit down with until that day. She listened to a new episode of a podcast she was following, then switched to music until she got bored. She didn't want to start up a movie or TV show, _hoping_ that they'd be set free soon enough that she'd just end up getting annoyed at having to stop as soon as she'd gotten into it. Finally, after carefully eyeballing the person in the next seat to make sure it didn't look like they were about to wake up from the nap they were taking and start looking over her shoulder, she pulled out her phone and opened up Tinder.

If anyone had ever asked Bethany would have insisted that she was _not_ the type of girl who looked for love on dating apps. She was the girl who could walk into a bar and have her choice of guys offering to buy her drinks, so why would she need to try to pick between them from what she could see on a screen? And it was, more or less, the truth; she'd never once swiped right while browsing, and the photo she used was carefully doctored into a heavily freckled brunette that nobody would ever recognize as her because she never planned on anyone needing to.

But there was game she liked to play with herself sometimes, if game was even the right word for it, where she'd shift through the guys looking for hookups wherever she happened to be until she found one who was just her type and then… imagine. Imagine that she was the type of girl who _did_ go in for one night stands with strangers, how the night would go, all the things they might do together. Turn the mental image over and over in her head, letting it build up in her mind throughout the day until she got back to wherever she was staying and could grab a toy and let that tension go.

She was still hunting for her choice of the day, the only one that had even stuck out to her being when Fridge's face popped up and made her shudder like her brother had just propositioned her, when she suddenly stopped dead staring down at the screen. A face that wasn't quite as familiar as she would have liked smiled back at her, one she'd always known she couldn't spend much time with because she was fully aware of how easily a married man could get in trouble from having a sexy young woman hovering around no matter how innocent things between them really were. It wasn't even until their last time in the game that she'd thought getting to know the man he'd grown into outside of the game might have been an _option_ , not until he'd come to the door and seemed surprised but not at all bothered to see her there. Even then she'd felt nervous for reasons beyond everyone else being back in Jumanji the entire time she'd been inside his home, dreading the possibility that she'd still be there whenever his wife got home and need to face her wondering what the hell her husband was doing with this strange girl. It had been a relief that she'd kept to herself when he'd called a babysitter for his Bethany instead of waiting to leave her with her mom.

So he was one person she really would not have expected to show up on a dating app.

She swiped her phone over to her contacts, a number that she'd never used sitting right at the top of the list. He'd given it to her after the last game ended, smiling as he told her he'd save her from needing to turn up on his doorstep if she ever needed to get him for another rescue mission.

He hadn't given it to any of the others, or asked for any of theirs although he'd taken hers when she'd given it. Maybe he'd expected her to pass it on to everyone else, though she hadn't. She'd told herself not to read too much into it, the fact that he'd never contacted her said well enough that he really had just traded numbers in case of an emergency. She followed his lead and left his unused in turn, apart from every now and then eyeballing it when she was sending pictures from her travels to the group and thought maybe he'd be interested too. Especially when something strongly reminded her of the jungle back in Jumanji; she was never completely sure whether he'd enjoy the memories of the nicer parts of it the way she did, or if being there for twenty years would have left him too traumatized to ever want to see similar scenery again.

She glanced at the person in the next seat again, then what little she could see of the person in front of her, and decided against making a call for anyone to overhear. Instead, before she could talk herself out of it, she sent him a text.

 _Did you get a divorce and I just never heard of it, or do I need to seriously lower my judgment of you?_ she sent, vaguely wondering if he might realize that the lack of any emojis or abbreviation said a thing or two about just how high her opinion was that she didn't want to risk him thinking she sounded childish or dumb, then after a moment she added, _Not that there's any reason I'd know about it._ and then _But. Still._

She didn't really expect to get a response, or if she did that it wouldn't be for awhile, but she'd hardly hit send on the last text when a response came back, _Bethany?_ followed closely by, _What?_

She swiped back to the app and took a screenshot of his profile that she sent back to him as an answer, followed by a simple _?_

There was a long, _long_ , pause that made her start to fear that maybe he really was dumb enough to try to have an affair on a dating app that anyone could see him on, and when he finally did respond instead of an actual answer it was with _You shouldn't be looking at men my age on a dating app, Bethany._

 _Sure about that? Your answer to the divorce question kinda decides if I swipe right_ she shot back, only to immediately flinch at her own stupid brazenness. It was the type of joke that she might have been able to send Fridge, if she'd given into the urge to throw him a text saying he should have a little more pride in how good his face looked instead of making his abs the focus of every pic in his own profile and he'd given her shit in return for being on to see it, without either of them thinking it meant anything.

It wasn't something she could say to _Alex_ and then pretend it didn't mean anything more than a joke. He knew there was truth behind the joke, she was sure that he did, she'd seen it in his face when she'd stared at him the first time she'd met the real him. The awkward recognition, left silent on both their parts, that there'd been something there in the game that was long past for him in their real world.

His response was even slower this time, to the point that she was just starting to think she wasn't going to hear back from him again when she spotted the jet bridge finally starting to move out the window and adjusted her thoughts to the idea that even if he did she wouldn't have time to give it her attention until she was home. But just when she was about to give up on waiting and put her phone away a response finally came through; _Widowed._ then almost immediately afterwards, _Come over._ and then, while her stomach was still flipping at the implications of the invitation a quick clarification of, _I'd rather not talk about it through the phone._

* * *

She didn't even stop home before heading straight to his house, her bags still sitting in the back of the rental car she'd mostly gotten because it would have been making a _statement_ to yank her luggage out of the back of a Lyft in his driveway. She knew she was about the least seductive looking she'd ever been, the end result of spending the better part of two days doing pretty much nothing but either sitting around in airports or sitting around on planes as she made the almost eight thousand mile journey home from Tinian Island. She'd taken the time to drag a brush through her hair before leaving the airport, to quickly wash her face and chew a stick of gum when she couldn't quickly find her toothbrush, but he wouldn't look at her and think that _she_ thought that he'd invited her there for any sort of _swiping right_ related reasons.

She knocked on his door, half expecting little Bethany to be the one who answered again, only to be brought face to face with him at once. It was a little bit of a relief and a little bit of a disappointment that she saw the worn sweater and jeans with what looked like a marinara stain on the knee that he was wearing; it said just as clearly as her own travel-worn appearance that he wasn't expecting this to be anything more than a talk between friends. 

But she also saw the way his eyes flicked down her, and thought that she wasn't the only one who'd been unsure of the other's expectations. Then his eyes narrowed a little with concern, and before even greeting her he said, "Are you alright? You look a little…"

"Like I haven't really slept since before I crossed the international date line? It's okay, I knew if I went home before coming here I wasn't going to get free of my mom for at least a couple days, so you're lucky enough to get 'not even rested enough to feel properly jetlagged yet'-Bethany all to yourself." 

The narrowed eyes turned into a full-on frown as he said, "You just got back in town? You can go home and sleep, Bethany, I'll still be here in a few days."

"No, no, it's cool, I've got a few hours left in me. Trust me, I've done enough traveling by now to be a good judge of how much energy I'm running on."

"I'll get you a cup of coffee for you at least," he said, stepping aside to let her in. "Do you want something for lunch?"

"God, yes, I would love something that's not airplane food," she said, following him in gladly. 

"I didn't even know you were out of the country," he said as he lead her to the kitchen, "or I would have said welcome back."

"I usually am these days, though I was still in one of our territories this time," she told him as she gladly accepted a cup of coffee he already had brewed. She wondered if he'd made it in anticipation of her arrival. "Honing my craft, you know?"

"'Your craft'?" he repeated as he shuffled around gathering sandwich materials, tone clearly amused at her phrasing. "And what craft takes you traveling around the world?"

"You can't guess?" she asked, pulling out her phone once more to open up her Instagram and hand it over for him to see.

"B. Oberon?" he read, shooting her a sharp glance at the pseudonym before scrolling down to see her work; hand-drawn maps neatly set beside satellite photos of the area she was charting.

"I spent most of the last two months camping on Aguigan," she told him, hovering a finger just above the screen of her phone to trace a length of coastline with a fingertip, "though I'd head back across the channel to Tinian when I needed to see humans for awhile. And to show them they didn't need to send out a search party yet for the crazy tourist who insisted on going out to live with the goats! It's tiny and uninhabited, and if you try looking it up you mostly just find maps that are detailless blobs or photos from a distance. It seemed like the perfect choice for the first place I chart out completely." More completely than she'd needed to, really. She'd started with a simple political map, getting the scale and shape of the coast as perfectly as she could, then starting over with that simple image as a base to work out physical and topographical ones as well. She even ended with mapping out the broken and overgrown remains of abandoned roads criss-crossing the island and the locations of the run-down shells of old buildings, wanting to leave behind something that might _last_ , might really help future people who wanted to explore a goat-infested abandoned place.

She didn't even know for sure if they made sense to people with proper training. Her cartography skills were all carried over from another mind laying over her own and bolstered by the confidence that came from hiking around with nothing but a map and a compass to guide her enough to prove to herself that at least the _reading_ part had transferred over correctly so she might as well have faith in the rest. But she took the fact that her Instagram had actually kinda taken off in certain circles, had actually lead to a few people reaching out with possible job offers, to mean maybe she was doing pretty well.

He looked genuinely surprised as he scrolled onward, going all the way through Aguigan and then back into ones she'd made from smaller patches of places she'd been before. " _This_ is your calling? Did you get this from—"

"Jumanji?" she smiled at him and shrugged, "What can I say? I liked being the curvy genius. I get that M and Spencer can't really use things the game could have taught them other than, like, confidence stuff, not unless they wanted to wrap their whole lives around getting into that sort of shape, and Fridge doesn't _care_ about zoology or, like, packing things really well, but I _love_ this. I love the traveling to far-off places and plotting them out part of being the map guy." Then she took a sip of her coffee, glancing at him over the cup before asking, "You never thought about trying to fly?"

"I flew three times and crashed three times, dying in two of them, when I was in Jumanji. That's not an experience I wanted to repeat in the real world," he told her flatly, only for a faint flush to touch his face a moment later as he glanced away from her and admitted, "Though there was once or twice when I remembered about that last flight and thought that it could be fun to try that again without the men with guns sending me off course."

"Well, if you ever give into that urge you can feel free to invite me along in case you need CPR on the other side again."

"I'll make sure to do that," he agreed with a laugh. "You can navigate for me while we're up there."

"It's a date!" she told him happily, then almost immediately turned her full attention to the sandwich he'd set in front of her while they'd been talking as she recognized how awkward using that phrase could make things.

Sure enough, the silence as she ate her way through a portion of it was more strained than the conversation before had been, though at least he didn't say anything like 'Please take your barely-past-drinking-age self away and stop making me feel like a creepy old man' and the awkwardness gradually faded as he seemed to grow amused by the way she devoured the food like she was as ravenous as a teenaged boy. When she thought the atmosphere between them had quietly smoothed itself out again she finally softly asked without quite looking at him, "Is it really difficult to talk about? You don't need to tell me about it if it is, 'this guy I think pretty highly of isn't trying to have an affair' was all the answer I really needed. More, I guess. I mean, who am I to start demanding explanations out of you really?"

There was a pause before his hand settled warmly over her wrist, and he said, "You're a girl that I think pretty highly of myself, so I'm glad that you asked instead of making assumptions." He could have removed his hand then, nothing more than a brief reassurance, but he let it stay where it lie, an innocent enough point of contact except for how easily she could imagine twisting her arm beneath his grasp and sliding it down until she could link her fingers with his. "Jill was already gone, the first time we met again. Andy was a difficult birth, she caught pneumonia while still recovering, it triggered postpartum sepsis, and… well."

Bethany's eyes finally left her plate, and when she saw the expression twisting his face she made her imagined movement a reality, though when she squeezed his hand tightly with her own it was only in an offer of comfort instead of any of the other things she might have considered. She would have known, if it had been after. If she'd seen a woman with the name Vreeke in an obituary, she would have known who it had to be. But Jill Vreeke had loved him, and married him, and died for having his child in a world that Bethany had no knowledge of before the moment she'd left the game that first time. The world where Alex had never disappeared. Andy had been so tiny when he'd introduced him to them, it must barely have been any time before at all, yet… "I never would have guessed, when we saw you then. I don't think any of us did."

"How could you have?" he asked, looking her full in the face again and offering a smile. "You guys turning up right then, I think that was when I learned to really smile again instead of just putting on a brave face for Bethany's sake. You were real, and _there_ , and even if I'd never seen what you really looked like I knew you the second I saw you. You can't get much happier than that."

"I'm glad," she told him, rubbing at her own eyes a little. "Though, I feel a little dumb now. I would have actually visited sometimes, you know. If I'd known you wouldn't get in trouble for having jailbait hanging around."

He made a choked noise, coughing into his free fist to clear it before managing, "I never would have thought of you like that."

"No, but I'm pretty sure any sane wife would have. Not to be super vain or anything, but have you seen me?" 

And just for a second, for all their awkwardly dancing around making sure everything was clearly clean and proper between them, he _looked_. Looked at her in a way she couldn't mistake, for all that she was lank-haired and bare-faced and dressed in ugly baggy clothing that she'd picked as something that would be comfortable while she was crammed into a seat for hours on end instead of for being attractive to anyone. She was in the worst state she'd let anyone other than her family see her in since she was ten, and he looked at her like she was something gorgeous anyway, though he regained control of his face so quickly that no one who wasn't as focused on him as she was would ever have noticed it.

Though once upon a time, not really all that long ago for her but her entire lifetime ago for him, he'd also managed to look at her in Dr. Shelly Oberon and, she'd believed, still maybe seen someone worth wanting there. 

It was only that look that made her risk saying, "And, I mean, I was checking out guys your age on Tinder, which plenty of people would side-eye even if it's not jailworthy anymore. How sure are you it would be wrong?"

That seemed to break whatever spell kept the physical contact between them comfortable. He didn't go so far as to snatch his hand back, but he tugged it gently free to rub his forehead with a groan. " _That_ was some guys from work convincing me it was time to start putting myself back out there. Letting them help me set up a profile seemed less embarrassing then letting them drag me out to a singles bar. I never imagined that you might see it."

"Is it so bad that I did?" 

"Bethany," he said seriously, gesturing at his own face, his own body. "I'm not Seaplane McDonough. Even if I _wasn't_ wearing something my son spat up on once, no amount of polish will ever make me Seaplane McDonough. Whatever you might have thought you wanted when you saw him…" he trailed off on the closest confession he'd ever made to having recognized what she'd started to feel for him back in the game.

"Except _yes you are,_ everything about him that actually matters," she told him firmly, reaching out to grab his hand once more and not let him pull away from her. "You're the guy who was so, _so_ , afraid, but still broke into the Transportation Shed with us and got us safely across the canyon. You're the one who protected me from the crazy asshole with the gun even though we all knew how hard you tried to protect your last life. You're the one who jumped straight back into the game for me even though you had better reasons than anyone else to never want to go back into it again, and you're the one who managed to get us both safely across the entire stupid country when the others died left and right before we reached them, and then you're the one who let go of most of your lives for poor Milo. So this is different?" She mimicked his gesture towards his face, "Well I'm not Shelly Oberon either, and that would be a _way_ bigger issue if looks were what we were seeing in each other back there."

"I'm more than twice your age," he said in a helpless tone, like he could feel himself giving into her arguments and knew that he shouldn't be.

"Yeah, but I've spent the last few years doing my best to live the _hell_ out of my life," she told him as she pushed herself to her feet, not letting go of his hand even as she slunk over to his seat, "A big part of that means taking opportunities where I see them. And I just saw one I never thought I'd actually have a chance at." She leaned in slowly, giving him all the time in the world to move away if he wanted, or push her away, or just tell her that she was reading everything all wrong and that look he'd given her was just a wishful part of her imagination. She would have accepted any one of them, maybe more than a little mortified but still happy to come back in the future as a friend now that she knew that friendship was open to them. But he did none of those things, only sitting as if frozen apart from his hand tightening around hers and his eyes first focusing on her mouth and then falling closed as she moved in, maybe all the welcome he thought he had the right to offer. Just before her mouth finally met his she whispered against his lips, "If you hadn't just cut straight to the chase you absolutely one hundred percent would have been the first guy I ever swiped right on, you know that?"

Then she finally sealed her mouth to his, soft and undemanding, leaving it open to Alex to decide how much he was willing to give her. The decision was made with a choked moan in the back of his throat as his free hand suddenly flew up to tangle in her hair and press her closer, his tongue flicking against her lips in an invitation to open that she gladly accepted. Bethany couldn't hold back a groan of her own when his tongue traced lightly across the roof of her mouth in a way that sent a burst of desire shooting straight through her.

It was only a kiss but it enough on it's own to make Bethany's legs go weak beneath her, only stopping herself from falling into him by planting a hand on his chest. She could feel his heart speeding beneath her palm, maybe even faster than he'd gotten her own racing.

"Alex," she managed to pull back enough to say, a little embarrassed at how his name came out almost a whimper even though they'd _hardly even done anything_ yet. Her hand dragged over his chest as she went on, more petting than deliberately seductive though she could feel a nipple harden under her fingertips when she grazed over it regardless, "Nobody's likely to wake up from a nap soon and start asking awkward questions about what I'm doing in Daddy's lap if I climb into it, right?"

For a long moment he seemed too dazed to get what she was asking, then he shook his head quickly. "I work from home. They stay with my parents during work hours." His hand slid down from her hair, drifted along the length of her spine, and hesitated for only a moment before curving down to cup her ass and urge her forward. "Climb wherever you want."

For the first time since getting there Bethany was actually grateful for her ugly comfy clothing, as they let her legs stretch wide to straddle him much more easily than one of the tiny tight skirts she might have worn if she'd been planning for seduction would have. She caught his mouth with hers again, letting him swallow her moan when she moved with the pressure of his hand on her behind and ground up against him, feeling clearly how hard he was already getting.

"Just so you know," she gasped as she slid her hand between them, feeling out the shape of him in jeans more clearly and urging him harder with a steady touch. "I am _way_ the hell on birth control. Seriously on team 'Never gonna have a period in the middle of a deserted wilderness' here. And I'll believe you if you say you don't have any STDs if you believe me when I say I don't." They were moving _way_ too fast. She knew they were moving way too fast, even as she released his hand at last so she could fumble open the button of his fly without ever needing to stop rubbing the length of his cock through his jeans with her other hand. Doing the responsible thing and going out to buy the condoms she was sure a guy who hadn't dated in years wouldn't have and she didn't carry in her luggage would give them time to cool down and decide if they really wanted to go from zero to banging at his kitchen table without even a single date in between.

But the fact was that he _wasn't_ just some stranger she'd spotted on her phone and decided to have a one night stand with. It was _Alex_ who was shoving his hand into her pants and hissing at how wet he already found her, Alex who she'd have started throwing herself at with all the subtlety of a canon ball from the day they'd met in the real world if she'd known he was free then. Alex who she'd quietly wanted for years even as she'd stayed away so he'd never be troubled because of her desire, Alex who she'd probably never even have worried so much about keeping her distance from if she hadn't known that any supposed wife's possible suspicions would have been one hundred percent correct on her end.

Just knowing that he existed in the world and that she had to keep away had been four long years of cruel foreplay that she'd gladly let finally lead her to a climax.

Yet she still said "Wait," even as she shifted her hips up to give him room to shove her pants down her thighs and kicked them away, "Wait, Alex," she said again around harsh gasping breaths, "When I said I had a few hours left in me I wasn't planning for any, you know, strenuous activity. I want to do this, I _really_ want to do this, but if we do I am totally going to crash and you'll need to talk to the kids about why there's a strange lady at breakfast. If you want me to just, you know, finish you off then drag myself home with a raincheck, I'm fine not making things awkward with them."

He smiled at her concern, caressing her cheek with one hand even as he kept his other arm wrapped around as he shifted their angle in the chair. "Bethie already thinks the other older Bethany is cool as heck from meeting you for ten minutes," he told her as she picked up the positioning he was moving toward and dragged down at his jeans to pull them more clear, "And Andy is a toddler, tell him you like Fiery, his stuffed dragon, and he'll think you're amazing. I had been a little worried about how I'd explain it to them when I found someone to try dating again, but _you_ , Bethany? I'm not worried about explaining you at all. Daddy getting to be with the lady who saved his life all those years ago will be the best type of story." 

Then he arched up, urged her hips down, and both of them groaned as she sank easily onto him at last.

Bethany wasn't sure how many fairy tales he'd actually be able to name that had the princess leave the prince behind for nine or more months of the year to see the world. Even still, as her body fell into a steady rhythm with his as easily as if they'd had years of practice together regardless of the somewhat awkward angle and the way the chair began shifting dangerously across the linoleum, she thought that this might be the start of a happy ending she'd be glad to come back to every single time.


End file.
